Lower Long Term Investment Tax Rates
With Romney releasing his tax returns showing his effective 13.9% rate, it should become obvious to the U.S. that investing in companies is a great deal.
At lunch the other day, a friend tried to tell me that buying a company’s product has the same effect as investing in the stock. This is not true because you receive instant gratification for your payment, while your investment is at risk and may pay you back over time. Additionally, your investment can be leveraged given accepted capital structure practices in the U.S., while your purchase is often not.
The Problem With Newt Gingrich’s Taxes
Newt Gingrich - By Gage Skidmore
Last week, Newt Gingrich released his 2010 Federal Income Tax return in a move seen as a way to discredit Mitt Romney with a 1% perception. The big “news” is that Mitt Romney pays about 15% on his $250mln of net worth while Newt Gingrich pays a “more admirable” 31% on his $3.162mln annual income.
Qualified Dividends
The difference in tax rates stems presumably from Mitt Romney’s dividend income, which would be taxed at 15% thanks to the George W. Bush tax cuts. Meanwhile, Newt Gingrich, only received $5990 in qualified dividends. The S&P 500 is an index of U.S. stocks that is generally interpreted to represent the entire market and an average of stability – its dividend yield was 1.98%. This puts an estimate of Newt Gingrich’s stock market holdings at approximately $300,000, or 10% of Newt Gingrich’s 2010 income.
The Problem is the Jobs Plan
The jobs plan that every Republican is running under is that lower taxes increase U.S. investment – which theoretically creates jobs because it helps companies grow. The problem with Gingrich’s stock market investments approximated at only $300k is that he is a perfect example of somebody who is investing very little, even though the tax incentives are already there.
Here are the relevant points of his plan:
- Stop the 2013 tax increases to promote stability in the economy. Job creation improved after Congress extended tax relief for two years in December. We should make the rates permanent.
- Make the United States the most desirable location for new business investment through a bold series of tax cuts, including:Eliminating the capital gains tax to make American entrepreneurs more competitive against those in other countries; Dramatically reducing the corporate income tax (among highest in the world) to 12.5%; Allowing for 100% expensing of new equipment to spur innovation and American manufacturing; Ending the death tax permanently.
Gingrich’s return also includes $10,754 dividends from tax exempt investments (likely municipal bonds), which suggest another approximate $200k invested. An additional $5,902 are from unqualified (short term or non U.S.) dividends. ( These are still trivial percentages given the small percentage of his income and therefore presumed, much greater, net worth.)
A long time ago, there was a concept that you were ‘innocent until proven guilty’. SOPA, on the other hand, assumes you are guilty and can shut down your favorite web site before the owner of the site has been alerted of the infringing content. Not to mention the owner is now liable for the content that some user innocuously posted.
The piracy acts could do this, and could make sites like Wikipedia, YouTube, and Facebook many times slower (say goodbye to realtime updates) and more expensive as reviewing everything posted requires extensive man power.
What happened to the freedom in the U.S.? The government is going to increase in size to manage DNS blockades? It will step in and add regulation to the internet similar to Australia with an easily achievable abuse that would silence free speech similar to the great firewall of China.
To scare you of China some more, consider that church web sites, their videos, and their musicians are some of the most likely to accidentally use copyrighted material.
For what it’s worth, some of the DMCA works. Violations were reported and YouTube and other major (and minor) sites took down content. Isps dropped violating customers, effectively doing what SOPA intends.
The DMCA is not without abuse either. YouTube and Megaupload megavideos have been publicized as receiving many complaints, but in the end, much of the content was original – or even uploaded by the claimant or its subsidiaries – with SOPA, instead of a hit video being blocked for a few hours while it is investigated (and losing revenue) the entirety of YouTube could be DNS black listed.
SCSS – Compiled CSS
At work this year, we started using SCSS, which uses a Ruby program, compass to compile stylesheets. This helps convert 8 different style sheet sets int one minified script – but most importantly, it helps with the speed of development.
Easier to Categorize and Add / Edit CSS
SCSS cascades your style sheets further than what is involved in normal css. Good CSS tends to be specific CSS, and when you get specific, you get many many descriptors, divs, and classes deep on any given line. It makes it a lot easier to find your content section and find all tags underneath it than to search through your CSS (which many developers may cascade incorrectly or add to on the fly and therefore be out of order).
Searching also becomes substantially easier with the implicit requirement to order. You can now search sections of code for the specific class or tag that you are looking to change the style for.
So yes, nesting is great.
Your’re Minifying Anyway
On Monday, I heard an argument that you shouldn’t have any code on your server that you can’t change quickly and on the server if necessary. I don’t really agree with that much at all, but the key when it comes to CSS is that you are compiling it anyway if you’re running any sort of high access application – you’re minifying it so that it transfers faster – and hopefully, it renders faster too.
Check it out
It’s easy to get, especially if you already have Ruby installed (or have a current Mac) simply “sudo gem install compass” and read some howtos on setting up your directories. You can then use “compass compile” in your directory structure – or you can set up a listener for changes (which you could setup on your live server if you want.)
Other features
Variables are another great feature. It can become a lot easier to specify a color template or a collection if you can set colors or attributes up with variables. Then, a few line changes at the top of your SCSS will be put in their respective place. Anybody who has developed in PHP or other server side languages has either done this or wanted to do this with their css.
Several weeks ago it became big news that the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration released a report that came to the conclusion that all cell phone use should be banned while driving. Currently, many states (including Georgia and New York) have laws banning texting while driving – and there is no national rule that ensures that all states are similar. The news stations in Georgia reenforced the idea through the same anecdote from the family that pushed the law here – after their son died while texting and driving. Here’s the main article.
Rather than choosing the banning of cell phones, government could choose to increase driver attentiveness and safety by making laws that ban automatic transmissions. Here are a few arguments for that legislation, but this is mostly backed by some preliminary studies I’ve seen and heard about attentiveness improving in ADHD adolescent males. Some other points I would like to make, manual transmission legislation could immediately:
- Immediately increases the skills and training required for driving
(Can make training more expensive, increasing the respect driving gets) - (Anecdotal) Makes drivers decide between talking on a cell phone and shifting
(though this only matters in traffic) - Increases fuel mileage
(the average manual transmission gets better mileage than the same car equipped with an automatic)
(speed and gearing thinking can use more read ahead and gear braking) - Decreases other distracted activities
(Drivers are less likely to eat or try to reach back to children while driving)